This talk traces how contemporary Palestinian poets writing qaṣīdat al-nathr converge on the body’s involuntary grammar — tremor, shudder, cold shivers — as the site where truth can be lodged once ideology and the nation-state project have foreclosed. Reading Batool Abu Akleen, Maya Abu al-Hayyat, Amna Abu Saffat, Ghayath al-Madhoun, Bayan Hamid, Husam Maʿruf, and Ghassan Zaqtan, I track a textually attested somatic lexicon (rajfa, irtiʿāsh, hazza, ḥashraja) that strains between somatic excess and the desensitization it risks producing. I argue that gender is this corpus’s formative ground: women’s poetry turns domestic trivia — what Aida Fahmawi-Watad has called fatāfīt, “crumbs” — into political argument, while men’s bodily vulnerability, historically forbidden by a code demanding silence about “the betrayal of the body” (Anton Shammas), is tapped artistically once al-Madhoun recovers kuḥl as an instrument of writing. Following Shir Alon’s notion of “writing the present” and Simone Weil’s theory of force in the Iliad, I read this body-turn as a refusal of reification, closing on a bone-stillness that is lisān al-ḥāl in its denuded manifestation — a condition no utterance and no genre can name.
Daniel Behar, who received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on modern Arabic poetry, Syrian literary culture, and translation studies. His book Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) received honorable mention in the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies. His articles have appeared in the Journal of World Literature, Journal of Arabic Literature, and Middle Eastern Literatures. He is also an active translator of Arabic poetry and prose into Hebrew. In the academic year 2026/27, Daniel is an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Maysoon Shibi is a researcher of Arabic literature, specializing in the poetic meters (ʿarud) of modern Arabic poetry. Currently, she is a guest researcher at the Institute for Arabic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, working alongside Professor Beatrice Gründler on the Hebrew translations of Kalila wa Dimna (DFG project, “Arabic Literature Cosmopolitan”). She has been teaching modern Arabic literature since 2015, at Tel Aviv University, where she finished her PhD on Palestinian khurrafiyyat (2022) and her first postdoctoral research at the Jewish-Arab cultural program (2023); and at Freie Universität Berlin, where she finished her second postdoctoral research on Arab women’s use of ʿarud in 20th century poetry (2023-2025).
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.